Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
George Eliot
-
Standard Name: Eliot, George
Birth Name: Mary Anne Evans
Nickname: Polly
Nickname: Pollian
Self-constructed Name: Mary Ann Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans
Self-constructed Name: Marian Evans Lewes
Pseudonym: George Eliot
Pseudonym: Felix Holt
Married Name: Mary Anne Cross
GE
, one of the major novelists of the nineteenth century and a leading practitioner of fictional realism, was a professional woman of letters who also worked as an editor and journalist, and left a substantial body of essays, reviews, translations on controversial topics, and poetry.
Some reviewers discerned a likeness between Lydia's devotion to her father and that of Dorothea to her first husband in George Eliot
's Middlemarch.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
153
Literary responses
Dorothy Whipple
A reader at Curtis Brown
praised DW
's very shrewd and natural gift of depicting her middle-class characters, while Lord Gorell
at John Murray
wrote: Much her best work and the former was good.
Whipple, Dorothy. Random Commentary. Michael Joseph.
23
Literary responses
Margaret Oliphant
The Saturday Review suspected the true author (that is, the same who wrote Edward Irving), but thought at least the early part of Salem Chapel worthy of George Eliot
. The reviewer found the...
Literary responses
Charlotte Brontë
CB
received inquiries about the novel's ambiguous conclusion and the fate of M. Paul; she would not say which way the book was to end, commenting wrily that Drowning and Matrimony are the fearful alternatives...
Literary responses
Jessie Fothergill
The subject-matter led one reviewer to comment that JFdoes not deal with the most agreeable of subjects.
Helen Debenham
observes that while JF
never abandons her social concerns, the emphasis shifts as she...
Literary responses
George Henry Lewes
A hostile notice by T. H. Huxley
in the Westminster Review (owned by John Chapman
) dismissed Lewes as an amateur and ranked his book below Harriet Martineau
's recent abridgement of Comte. George Eliot
Literary responses
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
A letter from George Eliot
written on 13 November 1877 thanked ESP
for her copy of Avis: I find the writing . . . filled with indications of that keen sensibility and observation which...
Literary responses
Lucas Malet
The Wages of Sin met sharply divided responses: fervent praise, or dismissal as risqué and distasteful. The Athenæum, the Times (which singled out Malet's golden gift of reticence, and a genuine appreciation of the...
Literary responses
Viola Meynell
In The Bookman, C. E. Lawrence
welcomed this novel as an individual effort of work which proves that however much she may have studied in the past . . . Miss Meynell has a...
Literary responses
Hester Lynch Piozzi
The Critical Review expressed impatience with yet another collection of memorabilia and complained that the book was deformed by colloquial barbarisms.
Critical Review. W. Simpkin and R. Marshall.
61 (1786): 273
She was attacked in newspapers (even those which began with respect)...
Literary responses
Thomas Hardy
The result was the novel with which he achieved general popularity. The reviewer for The Spectator, writing before the novel's authorship was revealed, commented: If 'Far from the Madding Crowd' is not...
Literary responses
Lucas Malet
Two things about this novel gave offence initially and had a long-term effect on its reputation: its treating the nasty
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford.
topic of deformity, and its involving the hero emotionally with three women (his mother as...
Literary responses
Lady Charlotte Elliot
LCE
received little critical attention either during or after her lifetime. The Athenæum obituary by Theodore Watts
described her as perhaps the latest noticeable addition to that bright roll of female poets of which Scotland...
Literary responses
Edith J. Simcox
As noted by Laurie Zierer
in Broomfield
and Mitchell
's anthology of Victorian women writers, EJS
's connection with George Eliot
has saved her from permanent obscurity, [but] her stature as a Victorian writer and...
Literary responses
Emma Frances Brooke
The book was similarly well-received across the Atlantic. The Brooklyn Eagle found that the first few chapters almost reminds one of George Eliot
.
Brooke, Emma Frances. Sir Elyot of the Woods. William Heinemann.
